Simon Willison’s Weblog

Generating documentation from tests using files-to-prompt and LLM. I was experimenting with the wasmtime-py Python library today (for executing WebAssembly programs from inside CPython) and I found the existing API docs didn't quite show me what I wanted to know.

The project has a comprehensive test suite so I tried seeing if I could generate documentation using that:

cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime-py
files-to-prompt -e py wasmtime-py/tests -c | \
  llm -m claude-3.5-sonnet -s \
  'write detailed usage documentation including realistic examples'

More notes in my TIL. You can see the full Claude transcript here - I think this worked really well!

# 5th November 2024, 10:37 pm / llm, webassembly, generative-ai, ai, llms, claude, claude-3-5-sonnet, ai-assisted-programming, documentation

docs.jina.ai—the Jina meta-prompt. From Jina AI on Twitter:

curl docs.jina.ai - This is our Meta-Prompt. It allows LLMs to understand our Reader, Embeddings, Reranker, and Classifier APIs for improved codegen. Using the meta-prompt is straightforward. Just copy the prompt into your preferred LLM interface like ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever works for you, add your instructions, and you're set.

The page is served using content negotiation. If you hit it with curl you get plain text, but a browser with text/html in the accept: header gets an explanation along with a convenient copy to clipboard button.

# 30th October 2024, 5:07 pm / llm, jina, generative-ai, ai, documentation, llms

simonw/docs cookiecutter template. Over the last few years I’ve settled on the combination of Sphinx, the Furo theme and the myst-parser extension (enabling Markdown in place of reStructuredText) as my documentation toolkit of choice, maintained in GitHub and hosted using ReadTheDocs.

My LLM and shot-scraper projects are two examples of that stack in action.

Today I wanted to spin up a new documentation site so I finally took the time to construct a cookiecutter template for my preferred configuration. You can use it like this:

pipx install cookiecutter
cookiecutter gh:simonw/docs

Or with uv:

uv tool run cookiecutter gh:simonw/docs

Answer a few questions:

[1/3] project (): shot-scraper
[2/3] author (): Simon Willison
[3/3] docs_directory (docs):

And it creates a docs/ directory ready for you to start editing docs:

cd docs
pip install -r requirements.txt
make livehtml

# 23rd September 2024, 9:45 pm / uv, markdown, sphinx-docs, cookiecutter, read-the-docs, python, projects, documentation

PostgreSQL Lock Conflicts (via) I absolutely love how extremely specific and niche this documentation site is. It details every single lock that PostgreSQL implements, and shows exactly which commands acquire that lock. That’s everything. I can imagine this becoming absurdly useful at extremely infrequent intervals for advanced PostgreSQL work.

# 23rd August 2023, 3:08 am / postgresql, documentation

How I’m a Productive Programmer With a Memory of a Fruit Fly (via) Hynek Schlawack describes the value he gets from searchable offline developer documentation, and advocates for the Documentation Sets format which bundles docs, metadata and a SQLite search index. Hynek’s doc2dash command can convert documentation generated by tools like Sphinx into a docset that’s compatible with several offline documentation browser applications.

# 19th September 2022, 4:19 pm / sqlite, hynek-schlawack, documentation, sphinx-docs

Cleaning data with sqlite-utils and Datasette (via) I wrote a new tutorial for the Datasette website, showing how to use sqlite-utils to import a CSV file, clean up the resulting schema, fix date formats and extract some of the columns into a separate table. It’s accompanied by a ten minute video originally recorded for the HYTRADBOI conference.

# 31st July 2022, 7:57 pm / tutorials, sqlite-utils, datasette, documentation

GOV.UK Guidance: Documenting APIs (via) Characteristically excellent guide from GOV.UK on writing great API documentation. “Task-based guidance helps users complete the most common integration tasks, based on the user needs from your research.”

# 21st May 2022, 11:31 pm / documentation, gov-uk

jq language description (via) I love jq but I’ve always found it difficult to remember how to use it, and the manual hasn’t helped me as much as I would hope. It turns out the jq wiki on GitHub offers an alternative, more detailed description of the language which fits the way my brain works a lot better.

# 26th April 2022, 7:04 pm / jq, documentation, programming-languages

Deno by example (via) Interesting approach to documentation: a big list of annotated examples illustrating the Deno way of solving a bunch of common problems.

# 17th March 2022, 1:02 am / deno, documentation

Making world-class docs takes effort (via) Curl maintainer Daniel Stenberg writes about his principles for good documentation. I agree with all of these: he emphasizes keeping docs in the repo, avoiding the temptation to exclusively generate them from code, featuring examples and ensuring every API you provide has documentation. Daniel describes an approach similar to the documentation unit tests I’ve been using for my own projects: he has scripts which scan the curl documentation to ensure not only that everything is documented but that each documentation area contains the same sections in the same order.

# 6th September 2021, 6:58 pm / curl, documentation, daniel-stenberg

The Diátaxis documentation framework. Daniele Procida’s model of four types of technical documentation—tutorials, how-to guides, technical reference and explanation—now has a name: Diátaxis.

# 21st August 2021, 10:59 pm / diataxis, documentation

Adding Sphinx autodoc to a project, and configuring Read The Docs to build it. My TIL notes from figuring out how to use sphinx-autodoc for the sqlite-utils reference documentation today.

# 11th August 2021, 1:21 am / sqlite-utils, documentation, sphinx-docs, read-the-docs

sqlite-utils API reference (via) I released sqlite-utils 3.15.1 today with just one change, but it’s a big one: I’ve added docstrings and type annotations to nearly every method in the library, and I’ve started using sphinx-autodoc to generate an API reference page in the documentation directly from those docstrings. I’ve deliberately avoided building this kind of documentation in the past because I so often see projects where the class reference is the ONLY documentation, which I find makes it really hard to figure out how to actually use it. sqlite-utils already has extensive narrative prose documentation so in this case I think it’s a useful enhancement—especially since the docstrings and type hints can help improve the usability of the library in IDEs and Jupyter notebooks.

# 11th August 2021, 1:03 am / sqlite-utils, documentation, python, sphinx-docs

Design Docs at Google. Useful description of the format used for software design docs at Google—informal documents of between 3 and 20 pages that outline the proposed design of a new project, discuss trade-offs that were considered and solicit feedback before the code starts to be written.

# 7th August 2020, 4:31 pm / google, documentation

The unofficial Google Cloud Run FAQ. This is really useful: a no-fluff, content rich explanation of Google Cloud Run hosted as a GitHub repo that actively accepts pull requests from the community. It’s maintained by Ahmet Alp Balkan, a Cloud Run engineer who states “Googlers: If you find this repo useful, you should recognize the work internally, as I actively fight for alternative forms of content like this”. One of the hardest parts of working with AWS and GCP is digging through the marketing materials to figure out what the product actually does, so the more alternative forms of documentation like this the better.

# 22nd July 2020, 5:20 pm / cloudrun, google, documentation

How to find what you want in the Django documentation (via) Useful guide by Matthew Segal to navigating the Django documentation, and tips for reading documentation in general. The Django docs have a great reputation so it’s easy to forget how intimidating they can be for newcomers: Matthew emphasizes that docs are rarely meant to be read in full: the trick is learning how to quickly search them for the things you need to understand right now.

# 3rd July 2020, 3:04 pm / documentation, django

Honeycomb changelog (via) Too few hosted services have detailed user-facing changelogs. This one from Honeycomb (a metrics, tracing and observavility platform) is a particularly great example. I especially like the use of animated screenshots, something I’ve been evangelizing pretty heavily recently for internal communication at work.

# 25th August 2018, 3:12 am / documentation